What you will learnFoundations of digital drawing, painting, and the basics for drawing human and animal figures. The workshop is built around helping you learn to manage the software and tablet while creating your first digital painting. You will be able to create your own art digitally by the end of week eight.

Advanced Matte Painting

With Heather Abels

InstructorHeather Abels previously worked as a set Extension Artists at Walt Disney Animation Studios in Los Angeles and had worked before that as Matte Department Supervisor at Rhythm & Hues on blockbuster films like Life of Pi. Life of Pi marked her third time contributing to Oscar winning visual effects films. Her body of work ranges from epic studio franchises such as Avatar and X-Men to national advertising campaigns and animated features.

What you will learnThe focus of this class is to take the matte painting skills you have, and apply them to the real world scenarios you might encounter working at a studio. The goal is that by the end of the class each you will have completed several matte paintings that demonstrate a solid technical understanding of what modern matte painting entails.

Becoming a Better Artist

With Rob Chang

Instructor Robert "Lunatique" Chang is an artist, writer/director, composer/songwriter, and photographer whose work has been featured in comic books, video games, animations, television commercials, feature films, music productions, and various publications.

What you will learnNo matter what area you specialize in as a visual artist (3D, 2D, film, comic books, games, illustration, visualization), this course will teach you the most critical knowledge, techiques, and creative approaches that today's artists working in highly competitive industries must know in order to function as a confident and authoritative creative force.

Biomedical Imaging in 3D

With Giorgio Luciano

Instructor Giorgio Luciano is a scientist with a variety of interests. He currently works as a researcher at the Italian National Council of Research (CNR) on topics devoted to the characterization and development of new materials. The main topics of his research are superhydrophobic surfaces and data analysis applied to analytical techniques.

What you will learn If you've ever wondered if the images of DNA strands floating in suspension you see on the covers of science magazines are real, the answer is, of course, that they are not - they are CG models. But are they accurate? Very possibly so, and if you're a scientist or researcher wanting to create realistic, anatomically correct and appealing 3D images of biological particles (including molecules, parts of molecules, blood cells, blood clots, DNA and more), then you need this 8 week, fully online and fully mentored CGWorkshop.

Body Mechanics

With Kyle Kenworthy

InstructorKyle Kenworthy has been an animator in the industry for seven years. He currently works at Schell Games in Pittsburgh PA. He has worked on numerous projects including Toy Story Midway Mania (where he worked directly with Pixar supervisors), Pirates of the Caribbean Online, & Disney's Toontown. Past projects also include work for clients such as Disney, Pixar, Sea World, Raytheon, The Dallas Mavericks, and Jakks-Pacific.

What you will learn Understanding body mechanics is one of the most important aspects of animation. In this 8 week course Kyle will take you step by step through his process for creating appealing, dynamic body mechanic shots. Kyle will teach you many useful techniques to help further develop your animation skillset including: finding reference, creating dynamic poses, working out timing, polishing tips, and more!!

Character Facial Rigging for Production

With Wade Ryer

Instructor Wade Ryer has over 10 years of experience in animated feature films. His credits include How To Train Your Dragon 2, Rise of The Guardians, Kung Fu Panda 2, The Tale of Desperaux and The Ant Bully. He has worked for such studios as DreamWorks Animation, Method Studios, Framestore, Electronic Arts, DNA Productions and ReelFX Creative Studios.

What you will learnGain a full understanding of how to create a functional, animator friendly, character face rig ready for their close up on the big screen! Wade will give you guidance along the way, industry level tips and tricks, not to mention, personal feedback on your character's facial rig.

Cloth Simulation

With Steve Sandles

InstructorAfter 14 years working with high fashion textiles, Steve Sandles decided to follow a childhood dream and have a total career change. Now after almost 8 years, and several high profile productions, from the Multi Award Winning Gravity to the Harry Potter series and pretty well everything in between, he is now a Senior Creature FX TD at Framestore, specializing in cloth simulation, and pushing the boundaries of what can be done with a few thousand polys and a bunch of springs.

What you will learnLearn the aspects of cloth in CG and professional cloth simulation for production. From nCloth to CG Tailoring Steve Sandles will take you through the different ways cloth can be simulated for cloth for production.

Concept Art: 2D to 3D

With Luca Nemolato

InstructorLuca Nemolato is an Art Director and Concept Artist who has worked on many Films, TV, Video Games and Commercials. Such as Independence Day 2, The Conjuring, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay (Parts 1&2), Maleficent, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Falling Skies, Once Upon a Time, Supergirl and Game of War.

What you will learnLearn the most up to date methods of Design being used in the Entertainment Industry today, how to interact with clients and deliver on their ideas as well as in depth exploration into the most used method in the industry, the hybrid techniques of 2D and 3D.

Intro to Digital Matte Painting

With Igor Staritsin (Content by David Luong)

InstructorIgor is a Senior Matte-Painter, Concept Designer and Environment Artist working in the film and video game industries. He has worked for various visual effect companies and clients all over the globe, such as Warner Brothers, MPC, Digic Pictures, Naughty Dog, Pixomondo, Axis Animation, Gnomon, Disney and National Geographic. David is ten year VFX veteran currently working at Blizzard Entertainment as a Senior Cinematic Artist II, his work includes digital matte painting, lighting, rendering, and compositing to finalize shots. Some of David's credits include Overwatch, Starcraft 2: Legacy of the Void, World of Warcraft: Legion, Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls, Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone.

What you will learnI'll be leading students through the process of creating a photo real matte painting for film or high end animation such as realistic and invisible right through to Sci-Fi and fantasy landscapes and cityscapes. This is not a concept painting class but rather a photo realistic or hyper realistic class. We'll use digital painting to enhance the look of textures, lighting, scale and create photo real backdrops that will serve story and characters in a universe.

Introduction to FX Using Houdini [SOLD OUT]

With Saber Jlassi

Instructor Saber Jlassi is a California based VFX artist currently working as a Senior technical director at Blizzard Animation. His current job consists of writing tools and scripts to improve the Lighting, FX and Compositing pipeline, in addition to collaborating with the Production to solve challenging tasks.

What you will learnThis course helps to lay that groundwork to understand what is going on under the 'hood' in VFX in Houdini. Saber will take you step-¬by-¬step through the construction using production techniques in Houdini¬ right from looking at the UI and procedural modeling and eventually on to particles, rigid bodies, fluids and lighting.

Lighting and Shading with Arnold for Maya

With Nick Deboar

InstructorNick Deboar has been working in the animation and VFX industry for over 13 years, specializing in Lighting and Surfacing. He just wrapped as a Senior Lighter with Rising Sun Pictures in Australia having previously worked for top studios around the world including Aardmen Animation and Animal Logic.

What you will learnArnold is an advanced renderer built for the demands of feature-length animation and visual effects. Originally co-developed with Sony Pictures Imageworks and now their main renderer, Arnold is used at over 300 studios worldwide including ILM, Framestore, MPC, The Mill and Digic Pictures. Arnold was the primary renderer on dozens of films from Monster House and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs to Pacific Rim and Gravity.

Mastering Destruction and Art-Directing Damage

With Keith Kamholz

InstructorKeith Kamholz is a seasoned FX Technical Director with over 8 years experience working on feature films and commercials. Prior to his current position at Double Negative, he's worked at Industrial Light & Magic, Blue Sky Studios, Tippett Studio, Framestore NY, and Absolute Post. His career includes 10+ major films, with highlights including Transformers: Age Of Extinction, Jurassic World, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, & Ice Age: Continental Drift.

What you will learnHighly detailed CGI destruction is one of the most jaw-dropping digital effects that audiences witness on the big screen, and Houdini is the industry-favorite software that top VFX studios use to craft these effects. In addition to teaching you in-depth technical working knowledge of Houdini fractures & rigid body simulations, this course will demonstrate highly effective production-proven techniques for getting beautiful work done quickly.

Motion
Graphics

With Nik
Hill

Instructor

Nik’s
career began whist studying for his BA in Motion Graphics at London Met, where
he entered a competition with studio Factory 311. After winning, Nik went on to
create more motion design for Arsenal FC’s online TV channel - Arsenal 360. Nik
graduated in 2012 and went on to freelance at SPOV, Weare17 and Territory. Nik
then was taken on as Senior Motion Designer at Territory and worked on a number
of feature films, including Marvel’s Avengers: Age of Ultron, Guardians of the
Galaxy, Jupiter Ascending and Agent 47. He was later promoted to Art Director
at Territory, where he led a number of film projects, yet to be released. After
working for around 4 years at Territory, Nik went freelance in order to free up
more time for personal work, passion projects and explore working with other
studios around the globe.

What you will learn

Covering the fundamental principles that go into making
exceptional motion graphics - concept, design, animation, 3D design, rendering
and compositing, this course has been created with professional output in mind.
The key to creating outstanding work is nailing these three key areas - 1)
Concept 2) Design 3) Execution. This course will cover the core processes
involved in conceptualizing and executing a motion graphics sequence - using
tried and tested, industry standard methods.

Nuke Compositing for 3D Artists

With Nick Deboar

InstructorNick Deboar has been working in the animation and VFX industry for over 13 years, specializing in Lighting and Surfacing. He just wrapped as a Senior Lighter with Rising Sun Pictures in Australia having previously worked for top studios around the world including Aardmen Animation and Animal Logic.

What you will learnThe course will cover common production tasks, such as dealing with multi-channel exrs, linear color, motion blur, depth of field and premultiplied images. It will then move on to more advanced topics; working with position passes, creating skies in nuke, eye reflections, re-lighting, stereo workflows, deep compositing, expressions and creating gizmos.

Photogrammetry for Games

With Jonathan Rush

InstructorJonathan Rush is currently the Lead Character Artist at BattleCry Studios (Bethesda Softworks) following work at EA Bioware, where he contributed primarily on the acclaimed MMORPG, Star Wars: The Old Republic. Jon has been working in the video game industry since 2001 and he has had the privilege of working with some of the top publishers in the world, such as Zenimax, Activision, and Electronic Arts.

What you will learnPhotogrammetry is the process of pulling visual data from an array of photographs for the purpose of generating fully textured high poly models. In this class you will gain mastery of the associated software, and the photography techniques required to yield the best results.

Rigging
for Games

With Ehsan
Kiani

Instructor

Ehsan
Kiani is a Technical Artist currently working at Blizzard Entertainment.
His role there is rigging assets and tool development across our pipeline
for Heroes of the Storm project. His roles have also ranged from modeler
to rendering and lighting artist, to generalist and to a creature technical
director.

What you will learn

Student will learn how to rig their characters in Maya, use Python
scripting to automate repetitive parts of your setup, quick skinning techniques
and tricks, adding real time physics and simulation to the dynamic parts of your
character, and eventually replacing it with an unreal engine’s game template so
you can play the game and test it out for yourself.

Rigging Techniques: Cartoon to Realistic

Instructor Currently at Atomic Fiction, Nico has also worked for MPC in London, Framestore and Dreamworks on projects such as The Tale of Despereaux, Madagascar 3, and Kungfu Panda 2 and 3!

What you will learnAimed at students that already have a background in rigging and want to take their skills to the next level, industry veteran Nico Sanghrajka will use his 9 year experience of rigging for feature films and showcase advanced rigging techniques that can be applied in cartoony and creature rigs alike.

Scripting and Tool Development for Maya

InstructorCurrently at Atomic Fiction, Nico has also worked for MPC in London, Framestore and Dreamworks on projects such as The Tale of Despereaux, Madagascar 3, and Kungfu Panda 2 and 3!

What you will learnFor some disciplines such as rigging and fx, knowing how to script is essential, but that does not mean that scripting isn't also useful for other areas such as modelling, animation or lighting. Knowing how to script will allow you to write your own toolsfor repetitive, mundane and boring tasks, extend Mayas capabilities and speed up your own, personal workflow, so that you can focus more on other aspects such as creating art.

Storytelling with Previs

With Bevin Carnes

InstructorBevin Carnes is an award-winning animator and previs artist who has worked in animation and VFX for 9 years, beginning as an apprentice animator at Disney and having worked most recently for the The Third Floor, Inc. where she did previs and postvis on a number of projects, including Avengers: Age of Ultron, Captain America: Civil War, and Doctor Strange.

What you will learnIn this course, students will learn the basics of previsualization shot creation. From composing shots to animating cameras to doing quick, efficient character animation and compositing, students will learn the skills needed to enable them to help today’s top filmmakers transform their stories from rough storyboards to fully-realized previsualization that is often not far from the finished product.

VEX
in Houdini

With
Anastasia Opara

Instructor

Anatasia’s
background is strongly connected with the arts, which cultivated her love for
experimentation since the early childhood. She finished her Foundation Degree
in the British Higher School of Art & Design exploring the theme of “Death
as a Positive Experience”, where she uncovered it as a beautiful event of a
harmonious cycle. She discovered procedural art during her bachelor studies at
NHTV International Game Architecture and Design (now known as “Creative Media
and Game Technologies”), and it has been her greatest passion since then. You
might have seen her Procedural Lake Houses project, where she aspired to create
a computer generated content that would look human-made. Anastasia believes
that this is a great proof of the power and flexibility of Houdini, and that
wouldn’t be possible without VEX.

What you will learn

Within
the first week students will be coding simple vex snippets in the new wrangle
nodes. As they advance, they’ll be making more sophisticated tools which
leverage the latest features of VEX like geometry creation. By the end of the
course students will be implementing state of the art algorithms in multiple
Houdini contexts from surfaces to simulations, shaders and even procedural
volumes.

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